Exhibition curator: MINA

Artists: Rashad Babayev, Zamir Suleymanov, Elturan Mammadov, Qafar Rzayev, Dadash Adna, Rafayil Rzayev and Inna Kostina.

YARAT Contemporary Art Space is pleased to present a new group exhibition The nomadic hearth of the imagination taking place at YAY Gallery.

Within the exhibited artworks with various mediums and techniques by seven Azerbaijani artists, the exhibition dives into the concept of how the ideology originated from ancient Greek poem describing that painful wish to return home, transitioning into being considered as a disease which may cause a decease and eventually becoming main mental and emotional natural practice of a human being through their existence which is called “nostalgia” and localizes it through the lens of being nostalgic as an Azerbaijani person also.

American sociologist Fred Davis in his book “Yearning for yesterday. A sociology of nostalgia” written in 1979, suggests that nostalgia is not only a feeling or mood that is magically evoked by some art object, it is also a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right, a kind of a code or patterning of symbolic elements which by some obscure mimetic isomorphism comes much as language itself, to serve as substitute for the feeling or mood it aims to arouse.

Parallel to that concept, “nostalgia as historical emotion is a longing for that shrinking “space of experience” that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations. Nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress” suggests Russian-American cultural theorist and visual artist Svetlana Boym. As she says in her book “Future of nostalgia” written in 2001 – here nostalgia is not an expression of longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into “local” and “universal” possible.
This exhibition does not aim to perform a ritual of commemoration of lost youth, lost springs, lost chances but creating a liminal space of that emotional/mental experience which can naturally coexist as much as collective and individual harmonically. It intends to demonstrate how nostalgia is the part of cultural memory and identity, also, how it historically reconstructs the idea of estrangement, reflection and affection altogether.

The nomadic hearth of the imagination proposes to analyze both sides of one coin here: First, what are we nostalgic about culturally, mentally, emotionally, physically, locally and universally? Second, can a person be nostalgic about a place or the period that they haven’t experienced yet?